ROME — Italy’s highest court overturned the murder conviction against Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend Friday over the 2007 slaying of Knox’s roommate, bringing to a definitive end the high-profile case that captivated trial-watchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Finished!” Knox’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova exulted after the decision was read out late Friday. “It couldn’t be better than this.”

AFP/Getty ImagesAmanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

In a rare decision, the supreme Court of Cassation overturned last year’s convictions by a Florence appeals court, and declined to order another trial. The decision means the judges, after thoroughly examining the case, concluded that a conviction could not be supported by the evidence.

Experts have said such a complete exoneration is unusual for the high court, which could have upheld the conviction or ordered a new trial as it did in 2011 when the case first came up to the Cassation’s review on appeal.

The justices’ reasoning will be released within 90 days.

The decision ends the long legal battle waged by Knox and Italian co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito. Both Knox, who awaited the verdict in her hometown of Seattle, and Sollecito have long maintained their innocence in the death of British student Meredith Kercher.

The Kercher family attorney, Francesco Maresca, was clearly disappointed by the ruling.

Across the Atlantic, a spontaneous shout of joy erupted from inside the Seattle home of Knox’s mother as the verdict was announced. Several relatives and supporters filtered into the back yard, where they hugged and cheered.

Dalla Vedova said he called Knox to tell her the news, but said she couldn’t speak through her tears.

“She was crying because she was so happy,” he said.

FilesVictim Meredith Kercher

The case aroused strong interest in three countries for its explosive mix of young love, murder and flip-flop decisions by Italian courts.

Kercher, 21, was found dead Nov. 2, 2007, in the apartment that she shared with Knox and two other students. Her throat was slashed and she had been sexually assaulted.

Knox and Sollecito were arrested a few days later. Eventually another man, Rudy Guede from Ivory Coast, was arrested, tried and convicted of the murder in a separate trial and is serving a 16-year sentence.

The couple maintained their innocence, insisting that they had spent the evening together at Sollecito’s place watching a movie, smoking marijuana and making love.

Knox and Sollecito were initially convicted by a Perugia court in 2009, then acquitted and freed in 2011, and then convicted again in 2014 in Florence after the Cassation court overturned the acquittals and ordered a new appeals trial.

That Florence appeals conviction was overturned Friday.

Sollecito’s lawyer, Luca Maori, called the young man with the good news from the steps of the courthouse.

“You have your whole life ahead of you now, Raf” he told Sollecito.

Telling reporters, he added: “He almost couldn’t speak. Eight years of nightmare over.”

ROME — Italy’s high court took up the appeal of Amanda Knox’s murder conviction Wednesday, considering the fate of the “very worried” American and her Italian former boyfriend in the brutal 2007 murder of Knox’s British roommate.

So many journalists and trial-watchers were on hand for the final arguments in the murder of Meredith Kercher that the judges moved the hearing into the largest available courtroom in the Court of Cassation.

A decision had been expected as early as Wednesday, but with a full caseload Wednesday and other court matters Thursday, the presiding judge said a ruling may not come down until Friday.

The judges could decide to confirm the convictions and 28 1/2-year sentence for Knox and 25-year sentence for her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, which would then raise extradition questions for Knox since she is free in the U.S.

The court could decide to throw out the convictions and order a third appeal trial. Less likely, it could overturn the convictions without ordering a retrial, tantamount to an acquittal.

To date, the high-profile legal saga of Knox and Sollecito has produced flip-flop guilty-then-innocent-then-guilty verdicts, polarizing observers in three nations. Knox has been portrayed alternately as a victim of a botched investigation and shoddy Italian justice, or a promiscuous predator who falsely accused a Congolese bar owner of the murder.

Knox, who has maintained her innocence throughout, was awaiting the ruling in her hometown of Seattle. She is “worried, very worried,” said her attorney, Carlo Dalla Vedova.

Asked if he would call Knox with the court’s decision even if it came in the middle of the night in the U.S., Dalla Vedova said: “I don’t think she’s sleeping much.”

Television crews mobbed Sollecito as he made his way into the courthouse, where he huddled with his attorney before the hearing began.

“I’m here all day, also tonight,” he said.

His attorney, Giulia Bongiorno, said she hoped the court would annul the guilty verdicts, saying the ruling was “littered with errors and absolutely littered with contradictions and by an illogical motivation.”

Also at the hearing was Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, the owner of a pub where Knox occasionally worked whom she falsely accused of the murder.

Kercher, a 21-year-old student from Britain, was found dead Nov. 2, 2007, in the apartment that she shared with Knox in the idyllic hillside town of Perugia where both women were studying. Her throat was slashed and she had been sexually assaulted.

Suspicion quickly fell on Knox and Sollecito, who were arrested in the days after the murder. The couple denied involvement and said they had spent the evening at Sollecito’s place watching a movie, smoking pot and having sex.

In his closing arguments Wednesday, Prosecutor Mario Pinelli challenged the defense argument that there was no clear motive for the killing. He said focusing on the motive was a “slippery slope” and that the high court should just follow the evidence.

Knox and Sollecito were found guilty by a trial court in Perugia in 2009 but freed in 2011 after an appellate court overturned the convictions. They found themselves back in an appellate court after the Court of Cassation vacated the acquittals in 2013 in a harsh rebuke of the Perugia chief appellate judge’s reasoning.

The Florence appeals court that convicted them most recently last year said in its ruling that the pair acted in concert with Rudy Hermann Guede, a drifter born in the Ivory Coast who is serving a 16-year sentence for his role in the slaying and sexual assault. The presiding judge contended that Knox herself delivered the fatal knife blow, writing that the American wanted to “humiliate the victim.”

Knox has called the reversal unjust and blamed an “overzealous and intransigent prosecution,” “narrow-minded investigation” and coercive interrogation techniques.

Knox, who spent nearly four years in jail during the investigation and after her lower court conviction, remains free in the United States. Her spokesman David Marriott said she would await the decision in Seattle. She has vowed never to return willingly to Italy.

One of her attorneys, Luciano Ghirga, said before the hearing began that he was certain the high court would rule in her favor.

MILAN, Italy — The Florence appeals court that reinstated the conviction against Amanda Knox in her roommate’s 2007 murder said in a lengthy reasoning made public Tuesday that Knox herself delivered the fatal blow, and that the overwhelming physical evidence precluded any need to determine a clear motive.

Presiding Judge Alessandro Nencini concluded in the 337-page document that the evidence “inevitably leads to the upholding of the criminal responsibility” against Knox and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in a hillside villa occupied by students in Perugia, a university town.

The judge said the nature of Kercher’s wounds inflicted by two knives and the absence of defensive wounds indicated multiple aggressors were to blame, also including Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivorian man convicted separately and serving a 16-year sentence.
Nencini presided over the panel that reinstated the guilty verdicts against Knox and Sollecito in January, handing Knox a 28 1/2 year sentence including the additional conviction on a slander charge for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner. Sollecito faces 25 years.

The release of the court’s reasoning opens the verdict to an appeal back to the supreme Court of Cassation. If it confirms the convictions, a long extradition fight for Knox is expected. She has been in the United States since 2011, when her earlier conviction was overturned. Knox has vowed to fight the reinstated conviction and said she would “never go willingly” to Italy to face her judicial fate.

Franco Origlia / Getty ImagesBritish student Meredith Kercher

Sollecito’s lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, tore apart the reasoning, saying “from the motive, to weapon, to the DNA, it is a string of errors.”

“I can’t wait until they fix a day to hear us for the appeal, because honestly the verdict is so full of errors, illogical elements and contradictions, that I strongly believe it will be overturned,” Bongiorno said.

The judge said relations between Knox and Kercher were strained, despite Knox’s attempts to downplay tensions during the trial, and that the two had argued over housekeeping and visitors. He also cited as credible Guede’s statements that the British student had accused Knox that evening of stealing rent money from her room, even though none of the defendants was convicted of the theft.

According to Nencini, on the night of the murder, Knox and
Sollecito arrived at the house sometime after Kercher, and Knox let Guede inside — dismissing defence arguments that Guede had broken in.

“It is a matter of fact that at a certain point in the evening events escalated; the English girl was attacked by Amanda Marie Knox, by Raffaele Sollecito, who was backing up his girlfriend, and by Rudy Hermann Guede, and constrained within her own room,” the document said.

Nencini’s reasoning assigned the role of each assailant: Sollecito, now 30, used a small knife that caused a wound to the right side of Kercher’s neck and also was used to remove her bra, the judge wrote, while Guede restrained and sexually assaulted the victim. Knox “delivered the only mortal blow,” striking Kercher with a kitchen knife causing an 8-centimetre-deep wound, the judge wrote.

The three trials have only physically identified one murder weapon, a kitchen knife found in Sollecito’s drawer. Forensic tests attributed DNA on the handle to Knox and on the blade to Kercher, although that evidence was placed in doubt by new experts in the first appeal that acquitted the pair. No smaller, second knife has ever been entered into the evidence.
The court said it was not necessary for all of the assailants to have the same motive, and that the murder was not attributable to a sex game gone awry, as it was out of Kercher’s character to have ever consented to such activity.

“It is not always the case that the motive of a serious, bloody crime is easy to read,” the judge wrote, especially when not in the context of other criminal activity such as financial gain. Courts have determined that motives are less relevant when the evidence is clear, he said.

Kercher was found dead in a pool of blood in the apartment she and Knox shared in the town of Perugia, on Nov. 2, 2007. Her throat had been slashed and she had been sexually assaulted. Knox and Sollecito were arrested four days later and served four years in prison before an appeals court acquitted them in 2011. Knox returned to the Seattle, where she is a student at the University of Washington.

Italy’s high court later threw out that acquittal in a scathing decision and ordered a new trial, resulting in January’s conviction. Both Knox and Sollecito deny any involvement in Kercher’s death, and say they spent the evening at Sollecito’s place getting high, having sex and watching a movie.

The courts have cast wildly different versions of events. Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder and sexual assault in the first trial based on DNA evidence, confused alibis and Knox’s false accusation against a Congolese bar owner, for which she was also convicted of slander.

Then an appeals court in Perugia dismantled the murder verdicts, criticizing the “building blocks” of the conviction, including DNA evidence deemed unreliable by new experts, and lack of motive.

That acquittal was vacated in March 2013 by Italy’s highest court, which ordered a new appeals trial to examine evidence and hear testimony it said had been improperly omitted by the Perugia appeals court, and to redress what it identified as lapses in logic.

Guede, was convicted in a separate trial of sexually assaulting and stabbing Kercher. His 16-year sentence — reduced on appeal from 30 years — was upheld in 2010 by Italy’s highest court, which said he had not acted alone. Guede, a drug dealer who fled Italy after the killing and was extradited from Germany, acknowledges that he was in Kercher’s room the night she died but denies killing her.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/italian-court-says-amanda-knox-struck-the-fatal-blow-blames-multiple-aggressors-for-roommate-meredith-kerchers-death/feed0stdAmanda Knox after a TV interview in January, 2014. The Florence appeals court that reinstated the conviction against Knox in her roommate’s 2007 murder said in a lengthy reasoning made public Tuesday that Knox herself delivered the fatal blow, and that the overwhelming physical evidence precluded any need to determine a clear motiveFranco Origlia / Getty ImagesEPA/MAURIZIO DEGL'INNOCENTIAmanda Knox posts sign declaring ‘We are innocent’ after guilty verdict reinstated against her and former boyfriendhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/amanda-knox-posts-sign-declaring-we-are-innocent-after-guilty-verdict-reinstated-against-her-and-former-boyfriend
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/amanda-knox-posts-sign-declaring-we-are-innocent-after-guilty-verdict-reinstated-against-her-and-former-boyfriend#commentsWed, 12 Feb 2014 21:38:28 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=427058

ROME — Amanda Knox has again insisted that she and her ex-boyfriend had nothing to do with the murder of Meredith Kercher, posting a photograph online in which she holds a placard with the words “We are innocent” written in Italian.

In the photograph, which Ms. Knox posted on her website and sent out via Twitter to supporters, friends and family, the words “Siamo innocenti” are written on a piece of white card.

Two weeks ago an appeals court in Florence reinstated the original 2009 guilty verdicts handed down against Ms. Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, with whom she was in a relationship at the time of the murder in November 2007.

Ms. Knox, 26, was sentenced to 28 years and six months in prison, while Mr. Sollecito, 29, was given a 25-year sentence.

Both are appealing against the reconvictions, with the case due to be heard by Italy’s supreme court later this year or early in 2015.

Even if the reconvictions are confirmed by the supreme court in Rome, Ms. Knox has said she will fight any attempt to extradite her from Seattle, her home town, to Italy to serve the sentence.

The American student also posted a blog entry entitled “Raffaele is not a slave” in which she contests the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Sollecito was so smitten by her that he allowed himself to get involved in a drug-fuelled sex game which spun out of control and ended with Ms. Kercher, 21, being stabbed to death.

FilesMurder victim Meredith Kercher

Ms. Knox said prosecutors had portrayed her former lover as a young man who was “both predisposed to violent sexual fetish and absolutely subservient to a dominant female companion”.

“Because he was present and supportive of me in the immediacy of the discovery of the murder and because my surviving roommates had described us as piccioncini (“lovebirds”–a far cry from the dominatrix/slave), the prosecution assumed and pursued the theory of Raffaele’s unquestioning devotion/obsession with me,” Ms. Knox, who is studying creative writing at the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote on her website.

She argued that the evidence against Mr. Sollecito was flimsy – “an unreliable trace of Raffaele’s DNA on Meredith’s bra clasp, a partial bloody footprint on a bathmat that more closely corresponds with Rudy Guede’s footprints (and) the unreliable testimony of a homeless, heroin-using serial witness who claims to have seen Raffaele and I… on the night of the murder.”

The prosecution’s case against both of them was based on “unreliable and irrelevant circumstantial evidence”, she wrote.

The former couple claim that on the night that Ms. Kercher was murdered, they were in Mr. Sollecito’s apartment, watching a film on DVD and smoking marijuana.

“The only reason he has been dragged into this is because he happens to be my alibi. He is collateral damage in the unreasonable, irresponsible, and unrelenting scape-goating of the prosecution’s grotesque caricature that is ’Foxy Knoxy’.”

The ex-lovers insist that the sole person responsible for the murder is Rudy Guede, 27, a Perugia drifter who was convicted of the crime in a separate trial and is six years into a 16-year jail sentence.

But in overturning their 2011 acquittals and ordering a fresh appeals trial last March, judges in the supreme court said it was their opinion that Ms. Kercher was killed by more than one person.

The Kercher family also said recently that they believed that the pattern of knife wounds on Meredith’s body strongly indicated that more than one person was involved.

Guede, who was born in Ivory Coast, is studying a history degree behind bars and is now eligible for day release, although his lawyer said this week that he has not yet made an application to the Italian judicial authorities.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: The latest guilty verdict in the Meredith Kercher murder case is arousing strong passions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Americans tend to believe Amanda Knox from Seattle and her Italian then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito did not kill the English exchange student in Perugia. Rather, they are all victims of a blundering Italian legal system.

In contrast, Italians believe justice has finally been done. With the verdict of the Florence appeals court, “Foxy Knoxy” has got her come-uppance.

But just about everybody agrees this is not the end of the road. Knox and Sollecito will now appeal to the country’s highest court in the hopes of getting a decision in their favour. In addition, the American is back home in Seattle and unlikely to return unless extradited. Sollecito, of course, is not so well-situated: Italian police have already confiscated his passport.

Some see the trial proceedings as exposing a clash of cultures — Knox is a hapless example of the American innocent abroad who falls foul of local mores, Italian prosecutors and police are sex-obsessed bumbling idiots.

Olga Khazan at The Atlantic magazine speaks for many Americans when she writes about Italy’s carnivalesque justice system.

[E]xasperation with Italy’s legal system is likely to flare once again, at least among Americans who support Knox. Apparently, this layer-cake appeals process and these reversals of earlier verdicts are nothing unusual for Italy’s big cases.

“It’s one of the many failings of Italian justice that it never delivers conclusive, door-slamming certainty,” wrote journalist Tobias Jones in The Guardian shortly after the 2011 verdict. “What usually happens is that the door is left wide open to take the case to the next level, first to appeal and then to the cassazione, the supreme court.”

In fact, judging from media reports, the entire ordeal — from the discovery of Kercher’s stabbed, half-naked body to this latest conviction — has been an illogical, clumsy disaster.

A European country convicts an American. The American watches the verdict in live streaming and then protests in a series of coordinated appearances … the whole thing chronicled in real time as if the murder of Briton Meredith Kercher were some sort of twisted reality show, not a heinous crime being tried in a serious European court of law.

Frankly, it makes a mockery of the Italian magistrates who professionally managed this appeal, and who regularly risk their lives prosecuting the mafia in that very same courtroom. Has American arrogance ever been so bold? Have the western media ever been so complicit in such an orchestrated public relations sham?

The Guardian’s Nick Richardson believes opinions have become poisonously polarized, filtered through lenses of national prejudice.

I’m not sure we can know for sure whether Knox and Sollecito are guilty or not. We became innocentisti or colpevolisti — the Italian media’s terms for those who think they’re innocent, and those who don’t — before we had any right to be either. Passionate desires for one verdict or the other were stoked by deep-seated resentments and prejudices … Was there anti-American sentiment among the colpevolisti? The resentment, even, of a former great imperial power towards the current hegemon? Almost certainly.

But the anti-Italian sentiment flowing in the other direction has been just as concentrated. The managers of Knox’s downfall have come in for savage caricature: Giuliano Mignini, a Perugia public prosecutor, has been portrayed as a senile fuddy-duddy; Monica, Napoleoni, head of Perugia’s murder squad, a vindictive bully; Patrizia Stefanoni, who was responsible for collecting forensic evidence from the crime scene, has been slammed for incompetence.

It’s not as if legal proceedings have been exhausted. The case can be expected to drag on for another two years, notes Peter Wilkinson at CNN.

Either side can appeal a verdict they are unhappy with, under Italy’s three-strike trial system. This could also mean the case would continue with no immediate outcome.

Even though Knox was convicted this time around, it is unclear if she will return to Italy. CNN’s legal analyst Sonny Hostin said that U.S. law dictates that a person cannot be tried twice on the same charge. “Because of this tension between Italian and U.S. law it is unlikely that U.S. law will extradite her. When the fight begins those are the grounds that U.S. attorneys will be arguing.”

However, another legal expert disagreed. “They always forget she was convicted first,” said Julian Ku, who teaches transnational law at Hofstra University in New York state.

At least no one will face the problem now confronting French authorities: a man found not guilty of murder after three trials has now been linked by sophisticated DNA testing to the victim he claimed never to have met.

Amanda Knox said Friday she will fight the reinstated guilty verdict against her and an ex-boyfriend in the 2007 slaying of a British roommate in Italy and vowed to “never go willingly” to face her fate in that country’s judicial system.

I’m going to fight this to the very end

“I’m going to fight this to the very end,” she said in an interview with Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America.

But she could effectively be trapped in the United States for the rest of her life if President Barack Obama’s government decides to protect her from extradition to Italy.

If her new conviction stands after further appeals, Italian authorities must decide whether to ask the U.S. to hand her over under the 1983 extradition treaty between the two countries.

Knox said she was caught off guard by the decision of the Italian court.

“It hit me like a train. I didn’t expect this to happen. They found me innocent before; how could they?”

She told Good Morning America that she has gone through “waves of reaction” and it’s “only on my way here that I got my first cry.”

John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, would ultimately be responsible for either approving a request and forwarding it to the U.S. justice department for processing in the courts, or rejecting it.

Knox would also then be under threat of arrest and deportation to Italy if she travelled to any other country that holds an extradition treaty with Rome. This includes Canada, several major Latin American states, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe.

Asked at a briefing in March last year what the state department would do, Patrick Ventrell, a spokesman, said: “We never talk about extradition from this podium in terms of individual cases.”

ABC / HANDOUTAmanda Knox, right, during an exclusive TV interview with Robin Roberts, left, at Good Morning America in New York.

AP Photo/Mark LennihanAmanda Knox smiles during a television interview, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014 in New York. Knox said she will fight the reinstated guilty verdict against her and an ex-boyfriend in the 2007 slaying of a British roommate in Italy and vowed to "never go willingly" to face her fate in that country's judicial system.

AP Photo/Mark LennihanAmanda Knox, 26, said she and her family “have suffered greatly from this wrongful persecution.”

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan“This is an experience that I have to testify to, that really horrible things can happen and you have to stand up for yourself,” Amanda Knox said.

AP Photo/Mark LennihanAmanda Knox wipes her nose with a tissue while making a television appearance, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014 in New York. Knox said she will fight the reinstated guilty verdict against her and an ex-boyfriend in the 2007 slaying of a British roommate in Italy. "I'm going to fight this to the very end," she said in an interview with Robin Roberts on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Knox had remained in Seattle during the trial. David Marriott, a family spokesman, said Knox awaited the ruling Thursday at her mother’s home. After the decision was announced, a person believed to be Knox emerged from the house. That person, surrounded by others and covered by a coat, got into a vehicle and was driven away.

Knox said in a written statement that she was “frightened and saddened,” she “expected better from the Italian justice system,” and “this has gotten out of hand.”

When asked how Knox was doing, her mother, Edda Mellas, said: “She’s upset. How would you be?”

AP PhotoA woman believed to be Amanda Knox, center, is hidden under a jacket while being escorted from her mother's home to a car by family members , Thursday, Jan. 30, 2014, in Seattle.

Meredith Kercher was found in a pool of blood with her throat slit on Nov. 2, 2007, in their appartment. Knox and Sollecito were arrested a few days later and served four years in prison before an appeals court acquitted them in 2011.

FilesVictim Meredith Kercher

The court reinstated a guilty verdict first handed down against Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in 2009. The verdict was overturned in 2011, but Italy’s supreme court vacated that decision and sent the case back for a third trial in Florence.

Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Lawyers for the pair have vowed to appeal the conviction.

Knox’s ex-boyfriend left Italy and drove to Austria while an appeals court deliberated his fate, police said Friday, but he eventually returned to Italy and surrendered his passport following their joint conviction.

Sollecito’s lengthy travels were revealed on the same day that Knox made clear she would never voluntarily return to Italy.

“I think it’s somewhat significant that, before the sentence was handed down, he left Florence where he had been and traveled many kilometers to get close to two frontiers, Slovenia and Austria,” Ortolan said. “It is a bit perplexing.”

AP Photo/Antonio Calanni Meredith Kercher's sister Stephanie, left, and brother Lyle, talk during a press conference in Florence, Italy, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014, the day after an appeals court sentenced Amanda Knox to 28 ½ years in prison and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to 25 years for the 2007 murdering of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, central Italy. For Kerchers family, the verdict was another step in what has been more than six years of uncertainty about how Meredith died and finding justice.

Sollecito’s lawyer, Luca Maori, insisted his client was in the area of Italy’s northeastern border with Austria on Thursday because that’s where his current girlfriend lives. He said Sollecito went voluntarily to police to surrender his passport and ID papers.

But the head of the Udine police squad, Massimiliano Ortolan, said police were tipped off that Sollecito had checked into a hotel in Venzone, on the Italian side of the border, and they went to find him there, waking him and his girlfriend up Friday morning and bringing him to the police station in Udine.

No arrest warrant had been issued by the Florence court. But the court demanded that Sollecito turn over his passport and ID papers to prevent him from leaving the country.

“I don’t know what I would do if they imprisoned him. It’s maddening,” Knox told GMA.

Since the court didn’t order Sollecito detained, he was freed Friday afternoon and was seen driving away with his girlfriend.

In her statement, Knox acknowledged the family of Meredith Kercher, her roommate in Italy.

“First and foremost it must be recognized that there is no consolation for the Kercher family. Their grief over Meredith’s terrible murder will follow them forever. They deserve respect and support,” she said.

For Kercher’s family, the verdict was another step in what has been more than six years of uncertainty about how Meredith died and finding justice.

“I think we are still on the journey of the truth and it may be the fact that we don’t ever really know what happened that night, which will be something we have to come to terms with,” said Stephanie Kercher, the victim’s sister who attended the verdict with her brother Lyle.

“It’s hard to feel anything at the moment because we know it will go to a further appeal,” Lyle Kercher said. “No matter what the verdict was, it never was going to be a case of celebrating anything.”

Knox said she has written a letter to the family of her slain British roommate, Meredith Kercher, expressing sympathy for the legal ordeal that continues more than six years after she was stabbed and sexually assaulted.

AP Photo/Mark LennihanAmanda Knox puts her hand to her face while making a television appearance, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014 in New York. Knox said she will fight the reinstated guilty verdict against her and an ex-boyfriend in the 2007 slaying of a British roommate in Italy.

“I want them to know I understand this is incredibly difficult. They also have been on this never-ending thing. When the case has been messed up so much, a verdict is no longer a consolation for them,” Knox said during Friday’s interview.

“And just the very fact that they don’t know what happened is horrible,” Knox said.

“They deserve respect and the consolation of some kind of acknowledgement,” she said. “I really wish them the best.”

Knox implored officials in Italy to fix problems with the justice system, and she blamed overzealous prosecutors and a “prejudiced and narrow-minded investigation” for what she called a perversion of justice and wrongful conviction.

TIZIANA FABI/AFP/Getty ImagesThis picture taken on October 3, 2011 shows Amanda Knox, centre, breaking into tears as she leaves the court after ther acquittal in the Meredith Kercher' murder at Perugia's court.

Some supporters of Knox have argued that having been acquitted in 2011, she would be protected under the U.S. constitution from “double jeopardy”.

Yet the U.S.-Italy extradition treaty only protects Americans who face prosecution again in Italy for an offence that has already been dealt with by the U.S. “This is not applicable in this situation,” said Prof Julian Ku, who teaches transnational law at Hofstra University in New York.

For extradition candidates such as Knox, who have already been convicted, the treaty states that Italy must merely produce “a brief statement of the facts of the case,” as well as the text of the laws governing the crime committed, the punishment the person would receive, and its statute of limitations.

The Obama administration could find some reason to decline a request. However, it would need to weigh this against the potential blow to cooperation on organized crime and other areas between the two governments.

FLORENCE, Italy — Amanda Knox’s ex-boyfriend left Italy and drove to Austria while an appeals court deliberated his fate, police said Friday, but he eventually returned to Italy and surrendered his passport following their joint conviction for murdering British student Meredith Kercher.

Raffaele Sollecito’s lengthy travels were revealed on the same day that Knox made clear she would never voluntarily return to Italy to serve the 28 1/2-year sentence handed down by an appeals court.

“I will never go willingly back to the place,” she said on ABC’s Good Morning America program. “I’m going to fight this until the very end. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.”

Lawyers for the pair have vowed to appeal the conviction, which upheld the 2009 verdict in the murder of Kercher, Knox’s roommate in the university town of Perugia.

Related

Kercher was found in a pool of blood with her throat slit on Nov. 2, 2007, in their apartment. Knox and Sollecito were arrested a few days later and served four years in prison before an appeals court acquitted them in 2011. Italy’s high court later threw out that acquittal and ordered a new trial, resulting in Thursday’s conviction.

Sollecito’s lawyer, Luca Maori, insisted his client was in the area of Italy’s northeastern border with Austria on Thursday because that’s where his current girlfriend lives. He said Sollecito went voluntarily to police to surrender his passport and ID papers.

But the head of the Udine police squad, Massimiliano Ortolan, said police were tipped off that Sollecito had checked into a hotel in Venzone, on the Italian side of the border, and they went to find him there, waking him and his girlfriend up Friday morning and bringing him to the police station in Udine.

No arrest warrant had been issued by the Florence court. But the court demanded that Sollecito turn over his passport and ID papers to prevent him from leaving the country.

At the police station, Sollecito told investigators that he had driven into Austria on Thursday afternoon after attending the opening session of the trial in Florence. After the court began deliberating, Sollecito said he travelled the 400 kilometres from Florence to Udine on Italy’s northeastern border with Austria and crossed the frontier, Ortolan said.

AP Photo/Stefano Medici, FileThis Nov. 2, 2007 file photo shows American exchange student Amanda Knox, left, and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito outside the rented house where 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher was found dead in Perugia, Italy. Knox spent four years in jail in Italy, from her arrest to her conviction in her first murder trial through her successful appeal. She’s now facing a second appeals trial, along with Sollecito.

He said Sollecito and his girlfriend had told investigators they had visited Villach, a town near the border, and had then returned to Italy and checked into the Venzone hotel at about 1 a.m. He said Sollecito didn’t explain why he had taken the trip.

“I think it’s somewhat significant that, before the sentence was handed down, he left Florence where he had been and travelled many kilometres to get close to two frontiers, Slovenia and Austria,” Ortolan said. “It is a bit perplexing.”

In Italy, adults checking into hotels must hand over ID upon check-in. Hotels are then required to communicate the information to local police. At about 6:30 a.m., police showed up at the Carnia hotel and brought Sollecito to the Udine police station, where he handed over his passport and ID papers.

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan“This is an experience that I have to testify to, that really horrible things can happen and you have to stand up for yourself,” Amanda Knox said.

Since the court didn’t order Sollecito detained, he was freed Friday afternoon and was seen driving away with his girlfriend.

Ortolan said the Udine police would officially advise the Florence court about Sollecito’s travels, and that it would be up to the court to order any additional restrictions on his movements beyond the prohibition from leaving the country.

The court on Thursday upheld the conviction against Knox and Sollecito, sentencing Knox to 28 1/2 years in prison and Sollecito to 25 years. It noted that Knox was “justifiably abroad” after an appeals court in 2011 acquitted the pair and ordered them freed.

The new conviction immediately set the stage for a drawn-out extradition process for Knox, assuming the verdicts are upheld on final appeal, a process that could take another year.

For Kercher’s family, the verdict was another step in what has been more than six years of uncertainty about how Meredith died and finding justice.

“I think we are still on the journey of the truth and it may be the fact that we don’t ever really know what happened that night, which will be something we have to come to terms with,” said Stephanie Kercher, the victim’s sister who attended the verdict with her brother Lyle.

In her Friday morning interview, Knox said the verdict “hit me like a train. I didn’t expect this to happen.”

Lawyers for both Knox and Sollecito have vowed to appeal, but must wait to see the written reasoning behind the verdict before doing so. The Florence court has 90 days to issue its motivations.

AP Photo/Antonio Calanni Meredith Kercher's sister Stephanie, left, and brother Lyle, talk during a press conference in Florence, Italy, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014, the day after an appeals court sentenced Amanda Knox to 28 ½ years in prison and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to 25 years for the 2007 murdering of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, central Italy. For Kerchers family, the verdict was another step in what has been more than six years of uncertainty about how Meredith died and finding justice.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/police-find-amanda-knoxs-ex-boyfriend-near-border-with-slovenia-austria-take-passport/feed3stdRaffaele Sollecito leaves the Nuovo Palazzo di Giustizia courthouse of Florence during a break of the final verdict of the Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito retrial on January 30, 2014 in Florence, Italy. Meredith Kercher was murdered in her bedroom on November 1st, 2007 in Perugia. On March 25, 2013 the verdict that declared Knox and Sollecito innocent and accused Rudy Guede of the murder was cancelled and the trial had to restart in Florence.AP Photo/Stefano Medici, FileAP Photo/Mark LennihanAP Photo/Antonio Calanni Amanda Knox sentenced to 28 years for murder as Italian court reinstates guilty verdicthttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/amanda-knox-found-guilty-by-third-italian-court-to-try-her-case
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/amanda-knox-found-guilty-by-third-italian-court-to-try-her-case#commentsThu, 30 Jan 2014 21:02:43 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=421161

FLORENCE, Italy — More than two years after Amanda Knox returned to the U.S. apparently home free, an Italian court Thursday reinstated her murder conviction in the stabbing of her roommate and increased her sentence to 28 1/2 years in prison, raising the spectre of a long extradition fight.

Knox, 26, received word in her hometown of Seattle. The former American exchange student said she was “frightened and saddened by the unjust verdict” and blamed “overzealous and intransigent prosecution,” ”narrow-minded investigation“ and coercive interrogation techniques.

“This has gotten out of hand,” Knox said in a statement. “Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system.”

Lawyers for Knox and her 29-year-old ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who was also found guilty, vowed to appeal to Italy’s highest court, a process that will take at least a year and drag out a seesaw legal battle that has fascinated court-watchers on both sides of the Atlantic and led to lurid tabloid headlines about “Foxy Knoxy” and her sex life.

It was the third trial for Knox and Sollecito, whose first two trials in the 2007 slaying of British exchange student Meredith Kercher produced flip-flop verdicts of guilty, then innocent.

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ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty ImagesThe plaintiffs' lawyer Francesco Maresca (R) speaks with Stephanie Kercher (C) and Lyle Kercher (L), the sister and brother of late Meredith Kercher, after the verdict in the retrial of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher at Florence's courthouse on January 30, 2014.

After the acquittal in 2011, Knox returned to the U.S., where she evidently hoped to put herself beyond the reach of Italian law. But Italy’s supreme court soon ordered a third trial.

FilesVictim Meredith Kercher

On Thursday, the panel of two judges and six lay jury members deliberated 11 1/2 hours before issuing its decision, stiffening Knox’s original 26-year sentence, apparently to take into account an additional conviction for slander, while confirming Sollecito’s 25-year term.

Legal experts said it is unlikely Italy will request Knox’s extradition before the verdict is final. In Italy, verdicts are not considered final until they are confirmed, usually by the supreme Court of Cassation.

The final decision of whether to hand Knox over to the Italians would rest with the U.S. State Department, and the issue is likely to stir debate over whether she is a victim of double jeopardy, because she was retried after an acquittal.

“Many Americans are quite astonished by the ups and downs in this case,” said Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the University of Washington Law School in Seattle.

Nevertheless, Fan said U.S. courts have previously held that being acquitted and then convicted of a crime in another country is not a legal bar to extradition.

Kercher, 21, was found dead in a pool of blood in the bedroom of the apartment she and Knox shared in the town of Perugia, where they were studying. Kercher had been sexually assaulted and her throat slashed.

Knox and Sollecito denied any involvement in the killing. After initially giving confused alibis, they insisted they were at Sollecito’s apartment that night, smoking marijuana, watching a movie and making love.

Prosecutors originally argued that Kercher was killed in a drug-fueled sex game gone awry — an accusation that made the case a tabloid sensation.

But at the third trial, a new prosecutor argued that the violence stemmed from arguments between roommates Knox and Kercher about cleanliness and was triggered by a toilet left unflushed by a third defendant, Rudy Hermann Guede.

Guede, who is from the Ivory Coast, was convicted in a separate trial in a verdict that specified he did not commit the crime alone. He is serving a 16-year sentence.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Knox’s home state of Washington, said she was “very concerned and disappointed” by the verdict and confident the appeal would re-examine the decision.

“It is very troubling that Amanda and her family have had to endure this process for so many years,” she said in a statement.

Kercher’s sister Stephanie and brother Lyle were in the courtroom for the verdict.

“It’s hard to feel anything at the moment because we know it will go to a further appeal,” Lyle Kercher said. “No matter what the verdict was, it never was going to be a case of celebrating anything.”

Their attorney, Francesco Maresca, called the verdict “justice for Meredith and the family.”

Sollecito’s lawyers said they were stunned by the conviction. “There isn’t a shred of proof,” attorney Luca Maori said.

In his final rebuttals, Knox’s lawyer, Dalla Vedova, told the court he was “serene” about the verdict because he believed the only conclusion from the files was “the innocence of Amanda Knox.” He later called the verdict “a big surprise.”

The first trial court found Knox and Sollecito guilty of murder and sexual assault based on evidence that included DNA. But the DNA evidence was later deemed unreliable by new experts.

Franco Origlia/Getty ImagesRelatives of Meredith Kercher brother Lyle Kercher (L), sister Stephanie Kercher (C) and their layer Francesco Maresca (R) react after the final verdict of the Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito retrial at the Courthouse of Florence of Nuovo Palazzo di Giustizia on January 30, 2014 in Florence, Italy.

AP Photo/Antonio CalanniDiya "Patrick" Lumumba, a Congolese citizen who was originally jailed for the murder of Meredith Kercher, leaves the court building on the occasion of the final hearing before the third court verdict for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, in Florence, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2014.

FLORENCE, Italy — The defence lawyer for the former boyfriend of U.S. exchange student Amanda Knox told an appeals court Thursday that the young lovers were blamed by authorities for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher to calm any fears that a monster was loose in their Italian university town.

Defender Giulia Bongiorno said her client, Raffaele Sollecito, and Knox were identified as suspects in a “record” four days after the murder in the picturesque central town of Perugia because authorities “did not want to think that a stranger, a monster, could have entered a house and murdered a student.”

Bongiorno said much of the evidence later used to convict the pair in their first trial — including the presumed murder weapon found in Sollecito’s kitchen drawer and a clasp that had been ripped from Kercher’s bra — had not even been gathered by investigators at that point.

Bongiorno, on the last day of closing arguments in the pair’s third trial, showed a court a series of slides and videos in a bid to dismantle the prosecution’s case.

Kercher, 21, was found murdered in her bedroom in the apartment she shared with Knox and two others on Nov. 2, 2007, having been sexually assaulted and stabbed.

In their first trial, Knox and Sollecito were sentenced to 26 years and 25 years, respectively, in proceedings that made headlines around the world.

Italy’s high court ordered the case back to trial after vacating their 2011 acquittals, blasting the appeals court’s handling of the case. While Sollecito, now 29, has attended several hearings, Knox, 26, remains in Seattle, where she returned a free woman after her acquittal.

A third man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Hermann Guede, is serving a 16-year term in the case after being convicted in a separate trial.

Prosecutors initially said Kercher was killed in a drug-fueled sex game that went bad. But in this trial, Prosecutor Alessandro Crini has backed away from the orgy scenario presented by colleagues in the previous trials. Now he is arguing that the violence was triggered when Guede failed to flush a toilet, igniting an alleged dispute between the roommates over cleanliness.

Bongiorno, the defence lawyer, argued that the young lovers had no motive for the crime, noting their romance was just 9 1/2 days old when Kercher’s half-naked body was discovered.

“The relationship between Amanda and Raffaele was tender, just bloomed, and it had nothing to do with a 50s-something’s searching for thrills,” Bongiorno said.

The two, she said, liked to cuddle and rub noses like Eskimo kisses, which she called “unca nunca.”

“Unca nunca has nothing to do with bunga bunga,” Bongiorno said, eliciting a rare moment of laughter of the long day of arguments with the reference to former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s infamous parties with scantily clad would-be showgirls.

AP Photo / ABC, Ida Mae Astute A lawyer urged an Italian appeals court on Monday to convict Amanda Knox, shown in an April file photo, of murdering British student Meredith Kercher and denounced as “unbearable” that the American was soliciting donations in Kercher’s memory

Bongiorno said Sollecito never met Guede before the crime “and it is absurd to think that they met that night.” She also argued against the theory that there were multiple assailants, and said the knife found at Sollecito’s house was too large to have been the murder weapon.

The defence lawyer blasted alleged evidence used to link Sollecito to the murder, showing a slide of a bloody footprint on a bathroom rug attributed to him but which she said was the wrong size and model.

“There was an enormous error in the print attributed to Sollecito,” she said.

Turning to a clasp ripped from Kercher’s bra — the only piece of evidence linked to Sollecito that was found in Kercher’s bedroom — she said it had been contaminated. Bongiorno showed a photo of the clasp on Nov. 3, 2007, under a pillow at the scene of the crime — noting that it wasn’t catalogued as the bra had been.

In another photo taken 46 days later, the clasp is found beneath a rug and at that point taken as evidence. In the interim, Bongiorno said more than 30 people had entered the crime scene in the meantime.

“The clasp was 1.5 metres (4 1/2 feet) from where it was 46 days later. It means someone or something moved it,” she said.

Bongiorno showed another slide, indicating that the clasp appears to have been stepped on between the first and second inspections.

And she showed a video of the search of the room when the clasp was found, pointing out that the investigator’s gloves were dirty and that the clasp was placed back on the ground of the well-trampled room for a photograph before being put in an evidence bag.

The court has set Jan. 20 for rebuttals by both sides. It is set to begin deliberations on Jan. 30, and a verdict is likely that day.

FLORENCE, Italy — Amanda Knox declared her innocence in her roommate’s 2007 murder in a highly unusual email Tuesday to the Italian court hearing the case against her. The former U.S. exchange student also said she was staying away from the trial out of fear of being wrongly convicted.

Presiding Judge Alessandro Nencini read the five-page email written in Italian into the court record. He noted that the email, presented by Knox’s lawyers before their closing arguments, was not a normal procedure in Italy. He said it highlighted Knox’s absence and indicated it did not have the same legal standing as a declaration made in person.

“Who wants to speak at a trial, comes to the trial,” Nencini said, adding that he had to take the word of her lawyers that the email originated with Knox. “I never saw her. I don’t know her.”

Knox explained her absence was out of fear that she would be wrongly convicted, which she contends happened during the first trial against her and her former boyfriend, Italian Raffaele Sollecito. The case against Knox and Sollecito is being heard for a third time.

Franco Origlia / Getty ImagesBritish student Meredith Kercher

Knox, now 26, spent four years in jail in Italy. She was permitted to return to the United States in 2011 after she was acquitted on appeal — a decision overturned in March by Italy’s highest court, which sent it back for a second appeals trial.

Sollecito, 29, has appeared at several hearings, declaring his innocence in remarks to the court last month.

“I am not in court because I am afraid. I am afraid that the vehemence of the prosecution will make an impression on you, that their smoke will get in your eyes and blind you,” Knox said in the email. “I am not afraid of your powers of discernment, but because the prosecution has succeeded already in convincing a court comprised of responsible and perceptive adults to convict innocent people, Raffaele and me.”

She said she was following the case closely “given that my life is at stake.”

Meredith Kercher, 21, was murdered in November 2007 in the apartment she shared with Knox in the picturesque Italian university town of Perugia. She had been raped, stabbed dozens of times in the face, had her throat slashed and her body left beneath a blanket in her bedroom.

Knox declared her innocence in Kercher’s death, saying the two were friends without any conflicts between them. She also said she had no contact with Rudy Guede, a small-time drug-dealer who is serving a 16-year sentence for Kercher’s murder. Prosecutors claim Knox and Sollecito carried out the murder with Guede, whose conviction specifies that he did not act alone.

Prosecutors are seeking a 26-year sentence against both Knox and Sollecito for the murder, and an additional year added to Knox’s three-year slander conviction — which stands — for wrongly accusing a bar owner of the murder. Prosecutors say the slander amounts to an aggravating circumstance, claiming that Knox lied to deflect investigators’ attention from her.

Knox, in the email, said she falsely accused bar owner Patrick Lumumba under pressure from the Italian police, who made her sign a false confession “that made no sense and should not have been considered legitimate evidence.” She said she was denied a lawyer during 50 hours of interrogation over four days in Italian, a language she said she barely knew at the time.

“They lied to me, yelled at me, threatened me, and gave me two slaps on the head,” she wrote.

In their closing, Knox’s lawyers said police never should have arrested Lumumba, who was held for two weeks on the basis of Knox’s confused statements.

Prosecutors initially said Kercher was slain in a drug-fueled erotic game gone awry. In this trial, however, they have focused on disagreements between the roommates over cleanliness, claiming that the violence against Kercher was sparked when she discovered that Guede had defecated in a toilet and left it unflushed.

Defence lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said that the changing scenarios for the murder and the lack of Knox’s motive were weak points — and that in there is not sufficient evidence to convict.

“The lack of motive alone is a reason for acquittal,” Dalla Vedova. He added that “there was a lack of proof, and consequently doubt.”

AP Photo / ABC, Ida Mae Astute A lawyer urged an Italian appeals court on Monday to convict Amanda Knox, shown in an April file photo, of murdering British student Meredith Kercher and denounced as “unbearable” that the American was soliciting donations in Kercher’s memory

While prosecutors have pointed to Knox’s DNA on the presume murder weapon and that of the victim on the blade, Dalla Vedova argued that it doesn’t make sense for the defendants to have carried the kitchen knife from Sollecito’s apartment to murder Kercher, then put it back at his house.

A murderer, he said, would have more likely tossed the weapon into the ravine below the house where the young women lived.

The defence has said Knox used the knife for domestic purposes and that the DNA trace attributed to Kercher has been put into question.

Dalla Vedova said Knox was a victim of “judicial harassment” starting from the long interrogations without a lawyer. She said Knox should have been dropped from the investigation, along with Sollecito, when a bloody handprint on a pillow in Kercher’s bedroom pointed to Guede.

“Guede’s handprint on the pillow from the beginning was the signature of the crime,” Dalla Vedova said.

The trial continues Jan. 9 with summations by Sollecito’s defence, followed by rebuttals by both sides the next day. Nencini said the court would deliberate on Jan. 15.

FLORENCE, Italy — A lawyer urged an Italian appeals court on Monday to convict Amanda Knox of murdering British student Meredith Kercher and denounced as “unbearable” that the American was soliciting donations in Kercher’s memory.

Francesco Maresca, in his closing arguments on behalf of the Kercher family in the third trial of Knox and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, urged the eight lay jurors on the panel of 10 to disregard publicity over the case as well as Knox’s own statements, including her criticism of Italy’s judicial system.

“She has become a well-known person. You know she signed contracts for millions of dollars for her book. She has someone who takes care of her public relations. She has a personal website where she invites people to collect donations in the memory of the victim, Meredith Kercher, which is an unbearable contradiction for the family,” Maresca said.

He said the world’s attention has focused on Knox, while “the victim has fallen into oblivion, to the immense pain of the Kercher family.”

Knox is soliciting donations on her website for her defence as well as a separate, as yet-unspecified project in Kercher’s memory.

Franco Origlia / Getty ImagesBritish student Meredith Kercher

Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said after the hearing that she was doing so out of the friendship she felt for Kercher, and that the criticism of her actions was irrelevant to the case.

Maresca also urged the court to disregard Sollecito’s statement to the court last month professing his innocence, noting that he had “just returned from a vacation in Santo Domingo, where he is again in these days, as we are here hearing such an important trial against him.”

Kercher, 21, was brutally murdered in November 2007 in the apartment she shared with Knox in the picturesque university town of Perugia. She had been raped and her throat slashed, her body left beneath a blanket in her bedroom. Prosecutors claim Knox and Sollecito carried out the murder with a third man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, who is serving a 16-year sentence.

The case was being tried for a third time after Italy’s highest court vacated a 2011 appellate court ruling throwing out their initial murder convictions. The high court’s scathing opinion tore apart the appellate court’s decision to free the pair as full of errors and contradictions.

Knox, now 26, spent four years in prison until she was freed in 2011 and returned to the United States, where she remains. Sollecito, 29, has attended several hearings of the current appeal. Defendants in Italy are not required to attend trials.

Maresca urged the Florence appeals court to find Knox and Sollecito guilty of Kercher’s murder, backing the state prosecutor’s demands for sentences of 26 years for the murder and a four-year sentence for Knox for slander — up from the three years already confirmed by Italy’s highest court.

He sought damages of 25 million euros for the family.

Maresca blasted the ruling overturning the convictions, calling it “a rundown shack razed to the ground by the high court,” and said the defendants’ alibis “were all failed and false.” He also tore into the expert DNA testimony on the appellate level, saying the first court’s finding that Kercher’s DNA was on the presumed murder weapon stands, that there was no contamination of DNA attributed to Sollecito on Kercher’s bra clip.

Maresca identified what he called two pivotal arguments in the case against Knox and Sollecito: Knox’s false accusation against a Congo-born bar owner and a staged robbery, both of which Maresca said were aimed at sidetracking the investigation.

Knox’s defence team has argued that she pointed the finger at the bar owner under pressure from police. She is appealing the slander conviction to the European Court of Human Rights.

The Kercher family’s legal team argued that the killing could not have been carried out only by Guede, reminding the court that Italy’s highest court ruled that he had not acted alone.

Maresca also argued that it would not have been possible for one person to inflict the kind of wounds that Kercher suffered: 43 in all, including three “devastating” cuts to the neck.

The other wounds were aimed at threatening the British student, and were found on her face, eyes, mouth, gums and teeth. He argued that two knives were used, the kitchen knife found at Sollecito’s apartment that is the presumed to be the murder weapon, and a smaller knife.

At the same time, Kercher had no defensive wounds, said Kercher family lawyer Serena Perna, indicating that someone held her back.

No one from Kercher’s family travelled to Italy for the closing arguments, but Maresca said her sister and maybe a brother would come for the verdict, expected in January.

While the defence has argued that neither Knox nor Sollecito had a motive for killing Kercher, the family’s lawyers said that the lack of motive “is irrelevant.” Another Kercher family lawyer, Vieri Fabiani, said Knox knew particulars about the crime before they were made public “because she was present.”

“It is not an automatic proof the fact that Knox knew the murderer was black, or that the victim screamed loudly, or that her throat was slit, or that blood was all over the room,” Fabiani said. “But let’s put them all together.”

The former boyfriend of Amanda Knox delivered an impassioned speech to an Italian court Wednesday, denying that the couple murdered the British student Meredith Kercher and saying that they had just wanted to be left alone in a “nest of desire.”

Raffaele Sollecito choked up towards the end of the 15-minute address, saying that he had been unjustly portrayed as “a ruthless assassin” and that his life had turned into a “nightmare” ever since he and Knox were arrested after her’s body was found in the cottage she shared with the American in Perugia, Umbria, in Nov 2007.

In the last day of evidence in the appeals trial, he said he had been very “reserved” when he met Knox at a classical musical contest in Perugia just 10 days before the murder, and that she was his first true love.

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“She was my first true love — I started rather late,” Sollecito said. “Amanda was carefree. She and I wanted to be completely isolated in our nest of desire, to live out a little fairytale.”

The accusations levelled against them were “absurd,” he said, during his first appearance at the third murder trial over Kercher’s death, which began in September.

“I have been described as a ruthless assassin but I am nothing of the sort,” said Sollecito, wearing khaki trousers and a brown pullover.

AP Photo / ABC, Ida Mae AstuteThis April 9, 2013 photo released by ABC shows Amanda Knox during the taping of an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer in New York

The 29-year-old said the four years he spent in prison after being convicted of the murder and sexual assault of the Leeds University student was an experience that he would not wish “on anyone in the world.”

Franco Origlia / Getty ImagesBritish student Meredith Kercher

He said he had never been in trouble with the law before his arrest for the murder of Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, Surrey.

He said the only fault of which he and Knox could be accused was failing to comprehend the seriousness of the situation before and after they were arrested six years ago.

“I didn’t take things seriously enough at the start,” said the computer studies graduate, who flew back to Italy for the hearing from the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, where he was on holiday for several weeks at the invitation of “a very kind friend.”

Prosecutors allege that Sollecito and Knox, together with Rudy Guede, a small-time drug dealer in Perugia, subjected Kercher to a frenzied knife assault in her bedroom on the night of Nov 1, 2007, during a group sex game that spun out of control.

But Sollecito told the court that he did not even know Guede, who is serving 16 years in jail after being convicted of the crime in a separate, fast-track trial, and that he barely knew Kercher.

Knox was not in court — she has elected to remain in her home town of Seattle, as is her right under Italian law.

FLORENCE, Italy — A court hearing Amanda Knox’s second appeals trial on Monday accepted a request to run additional DNA tests on the presumed weapon in the murder of Meredith Kercher, but rejected most other defence requests for new testimony or evidence.

Presiding Judge Alessandro Nencini said the court agreed to test one DNA trace not previously examined because it had been deemed too small. A court-ordered review in the first appeals trial, which acquitted both Knox and her former Italian boyfriend, discredited DNA evidence on the kitchen knife linked to Kercher.

The court also agreed to the prosecution’s request to again hear testimony from a jailed Mafioso, Luciano Aviello, who has accused his brother in the murder. Aviello, a mobster who has been convicted of several crimes including defamation, is to testify on Friday.

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Italy’s highest court in March ordered a new trial for Knox and her former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, overturning their acquittals in Kercher’s gruesome 2007 killing. The star defendant and her former boyfriend were both absent at its opening Monday.

During opening statements, lawyers for Knox and Sollecito requested an array of new expert opinions and evidence to reach a definitive verdict, but the court rejected most of them.

Knox defence lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said there was a risk of an “infinite trial,” since the charge of murder has no statute of limitations. Sollecito’s lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, asked the court to accept only “reliable evidence,” saying the intense media attention on the case had affected the three previous trials.

AP / ABC / Ida Mae Astute filesAmanda Knox was acquitted by Italy's highest criminal court in the 2007 murder of a British student and ordered a new trial.

The appellate court in Florence is expected to re-examine forensic evidence to determine whether Knox and her ex-boyfriend helped kill the 21-year-old Kercher while the two women shared an apartment in the Umbrian university town of Perugia. The prosecution advanced the theory that Kercher died during a sex-fueled game gone bad.

Knox, now a 26-year-old University of Washington student in Seattle, has not returned to Italy for the current trial, nor is she compelled by law to do so. The appellate court noted the absence both of Knox and Sollecito, but did not declare either in contempt.

“We refute the idea that because Amanda is not coming, that Amanda is guilty, that Amanda is using a strategy. Amanda always said she was a friend of Meredith’s. Amanda has always respected the Italian justice system,” one of Knox’s defence lawyers, Luciano Ghirga, told reporters before the trial opened.

REUTERS/Alessandro BianchiRaffaele Sollecito

Knox and Sollecito, now 29, were convicted and later acquitted in Kercher’s death. Knox served four years of a 26-year sentence, including three years on a slander conviction for falsely accusing a Perugia bar owner in the murder, before leaving Italy a free woman after her 2011 acquittal.

The bar owner, Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, showed up at the trial Monday, saying he did so to underline the damage he suffered from Knox’s false accusations. “I say the same thing I said six years ago. I think she is guilty, and that is why she slandered me,” Lumumba told reporters.

Knox’s conviction for slandering Lumumba has been confirmed by the high court, but it asked the Florence appeals court to examine whether to reinstate an aggravating circumstance that Knox lied to derail the investigation and protect herself from becoming a murder suspect.

In its first move, the Florence court rejected a motion by Knox’s lawyers to exclude Lumumba from the new appeals trial as a civil participant, a status that allows him to seek further damages. His lawyer says Lumumba is owed more than 103,000 euros (US$139,500) in legal fees.

Knox’s protracted legal battle in Italy has made her a cause celebre in the United States and has put the Italian justice system under scrutiny. The Italian system does not include U.S. Fifth Amendment protection against a defendant being put in double jeopardy by government prosecution.

At the same time, the trials have left the Kercher family without clear answers in the death of their daughter.

Kercher’s body was found in November 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, a central Italian town popular with foreign exchange students. Her throat had been slashed.

A third man, Rudy Guede, was convicted in the slaying and is serving a 16-year term. That court found that Guede had not acted alone.

“We are still convinced of the presence of all three of the defendants at the scene of the crime,” Kercher family lawyer Francesco Maresca told reporters. “I think (Knox) is talking too much, sincerely, and this attitude of continuous playing the victim is inappropriate.”

In its stunning 2011 acquittal that overturned Knox and Sollecito’s convictions, a Perugia appeals court criticized virtually the prosecution’s entire case. The appellate court noted that the murder weapon was never found, said that DNA tests were faulty, and that prosecutors provided no murder motive.

Yet the Court of Cassation ruling was likewise strident, criticizing the appeals court ruling and saying it “openly collides with objective facts of the case.” The high court said the appellate judges had ignored some evidence, considered other evidence insufficiently and undervalued the fact that Knox had initially accused a man of committing the crime who had nothing to do with it.

LONDON — A British tabloid has published photos of an apparent reunion between Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend, who were acquitted after serving four years in prison in Italy for the murder of student Meredith Kirchner.

Knox, 25, and her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 29, were initially convicted of the crime and sentenced to long prison terms. An appeals court acquitted them in 2011.

Britain’s Daily Mirror said Thursday that the pair had a secret reunion, publishing photos of what it said was Knox and Sollecito walking together in New York.

The photos were allegedly taken Tuesday — the same day Italy’s high court harshly faulted the appeals court that acquitted Knox and ordered a new appeals court to consider all the evidence to determine whether Knox helped kill Kirchner.

ROME — Italy’s high court on Tuesday faulted the appeals court that acquitted American student Amanda Knox of murdering her roommate, saying its ruling was full of “deficiencies, contradictions and illogical” conclusions and ordering the new appeals court to look at all the evidence to determine whether Knox helped kill the teen.

In March, the Court of Cassation overturned Knox’s acquittal in the 2007 murder of flatmate Meredith Kercher and ordered a new trial. On Tuesday, the high court issued its written reasoning for doing so.

Kercher’s body was found in November 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, a central Italian town popular with foreign exchange students.

Knox, now 25, and her Italian then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 29, were initially convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, but a Perugia appeals court acquitted them in 2011, criticizing virtually the entire case mounted by prosecutors. The appellate court noted that the murder weapon was never found, said that DNA tests were faulty and that prosecutors provided no murder motive.

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A young man from Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the slaying in a separate proceeding and is serving a 16-year sentence.

In the 74-page Cassation ruling, the high court judges said they “had to recognize that he [Guede] was not the sole author” of the crime, Italian news agency LaPresse reported. The judges though said he was the “main protagonist.”

They said the new appeal process would serve to “not only demonstrate the presence of the two suspects in the place of the crime, but to possibly outline the subjective position of Guede’s accomplices.” It said hypotheses ran from a simple case of forced sex involving Kercher “to a group erotic game that blew up and got out of control.”

The high court faulted the Perugia appeals court for “multiple instances of deficiencies, contradictions and illogical” conclusions. The new court must conduct a full examination of evidence to resolve the ambiguities, it said.

Knox left Italy a free woman after her 2011 acquittal, after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence. Now a University of Washington student in Seattle, she has called the reversal by the Cassation “painful” but said she was confident she would be exonerated. Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial and her lawyers have said she has no plans to do so. It is unclear what would happen to Knox if a possible conviction from the new trial is upheld on final appeal.

No date for the new trial has been set. Florence’s appeals court was chosen since Perugia only has one appellate court.

Knox and Sollecito denied wrongdoing and said they weren’t even in the apartment that night, although they acknowledged they had smoked marijuana and their memories were clouded.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/italys-high-court-says-ruling-that-acquitted-amanda-knox-was-full-of-deficiencies-contradictions-and-illogical-orders-new-court-to-look-at-evidence/feed0stdItaly’s high court on Tuesday faulted the appeals court that acquitted American student Amanda Knox of murdering her roommate, saying its ruling was full of “deficiencies, contradictions and illogical” conclusions and ordering the new appeals court to look at all the evidence to determine whether Knox helped kill the teen.'I am not going to change my story' over wave of Italian defamation suits: Amanda Knoxhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/amanda-knox-i-am-not-going-to-change-my-story-over-lawsuits
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/amanda-knox-i-am-not-going-to-change-my-story-over-lawsuits#commentsFri, 17 May 2013 18:52:25 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=309943

FilesVictim Meredith Kercher

Amanda Knox, the woman vilified by Italian prosecutors as a witch and a she-devil who enticed a stranger to commit murder, says she is now a timid person compared to the brash 20-year-old who left her middle-class Seattle family in 2007 to spend a year studying in Perugia. The woman, dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” by the press, has just released a book, Waiting to be Heard, detailing her four years in an Italian prison for murdering roommate Meredith Kercher, 21, and her acquittal in 2011. In an interview with Peter Wilson, Ms. Knox, 25, talks about past ordeals and future dilemmas.

Did a kiss seal Ms. Knox’s fate? The woman and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were seen kissing outside the house where the murder took place soon after Ms. Kercher’s body was found. Police thought her cold and she became the centre of their investigation.
People caught up in a tragedy can react in unexpected ways and their initial behaviour can be seen in a sinister light, Ms. Knox said in a telephone interview from New York. “That video was cut and repeated so that all you see is a loop of me and Raffaele kissing over and over and over again. In fact, I had not even accepted the reality of the situation so I just felt incredibly lost, and I was sad and I was trying to understand, and Raffaele kissed me to console me because our language barrier prevented us from really being able to console each other with words.”

Rudy Guede, a drug dealer and burglar, was convicted of the murder but had his 30-year sentence cut to 16 years after he agreed to give evidence against Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito. He claimed he was with Ms. Kercher on the night, but she was attacked when he was in the bathroom. He claimed Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito were also there.

Ms. Knox said she was convinced Guede committed the murder alone. “He only changed his story to start accusing Raffaele and me once he was arrested. As soon as that started happening it was the prosecutor calling him ‘poor Rudy’ to show how much I manipulated him into doing this horrible thing and that was baffling to me. It was offensive to me that the prosecutor would do that.” She said she hopes Guede eventually confesses but, “I’m not holding my breath.”

Last month, the Italian Supreme Court ordered Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito to be retried on the murder charge, although she is unlikely to return to Italy. Her book, which earned her an advance of almost $4-million, also risks inflaming Italian public opinion, offending the nation’s judges and triggering a wave of new defamation actions by the police and prosecutors she accuses of framing her.

“People asked me if I would change the book and I said absolutely not … I am not going to change my story just because someone is threatening to sue me but I mean … it sucks. It sucks and it sucks.”

Ms. Kercher’s father, John, released a book last year, Meredith: Our Daughter’s Murder and the Heartbreaking Quest for the Truth, in which he called for anyone involved in the killing to “come clean.”

“It is painful for me to read about how John Kercher believes that I am guilty and the fact that he is basing it on information that is not accurate, and that is heart-breaking to me.” She conceded the Kerchers were unlikely to change their opinion because even her acquittal in 2011 did not sway them. “I remember that I harboured this hope that the acquittal would change their opinion, but then I read John Kercher’s book and that was kind of crushing for me.”

Five months after being released, Mr. Sollecito visited her in Seattle. By that time he had a new girlfriend and Ms. Knox had begun a serious relationship with James Terrano, a college friend and musician.

“James and I had dated very briefly when I was in college, but when I was in prison we were writing to each other as just friends, there was never any hinting or anything. But when I came back it was actually not very long that it took for us to start looking at each other. I lived with a girlfriend for a long time and I live on my own now although James is with me a lot. We are very close.” Describing herself as newly introspective and cautious about people, Ms. Knox said at one point she felt she was disappointing her family because she was no longer “the same chirpy old Amanda.” She began studying creative writing at the University of Washington after her release. She plans to graduate next year and keep writing books, if she can afford to. Her advance from HarperCollins has been largely swallowed up by legal fees and the debt of about $1.5-million she says her family ran up supporting her in Perugia; the retrial will mean more legal fees. “I don’t know what I am going to do. The future is very unsure for me financially.”

AP Photo/Alessandra TarantinoAmanda Knox, right, walks past Raffaele Sollecito, as she arrives after a break to attend a hearing in her appeals trial in 2010.

PERUGIA, Italy — Lack of motive and faulty evidence led to the acquittal of American student Amanda Knox in the murder of her British flatmate, the Italian court that cleared her said on Thursday.

Knox, 24, saw her previous conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher overturned by the appeals court in October. Hours later, she left the hill town of Perugia and flew home to Seattle.

Kercher, 21, was murdered in 2007 in the apartment she shared with Knox when they were studying in Perugia. The Briton’s half-naked body was found in her own bedroom with over 40 wounds and a deep gash in the throat.

Also acquitted on appeal was Knox’s boyfriend at the time of the murder, the Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

FacebookMeredith Kercher appears in a photo on her Facebook account on November 2, 2007.

A 144-page document issued by the court to explain its reasoning said forensic evidence used to support the original verdicts was unreliable, and could not ultimately prove the couple were at the crime scene on the night of the murder — Nov. 1, 2007.

Ultimately, the prosecutors’ case could not stand, the court said.

“The bricks of that building just gave way,” the document said. “It’s not just a case of reassembling the bricks … but rather a lack of the necessary material for the construction.”

In Italy, courts have to release a document to explain their motivation for reaching a verdict.

The court pointed to what it said were flaws in collecting forensic evidence and testing DNA traces originally linked to the defendants. The two have always denied being at Knox’s house at the time of the murder.

Knox, who is now considering deals to write a book about her experience, was originally sentenced to 26 years in prison and Sollecito to 25 years in a case that drew attention around the world.

Rudy Guede, an Ivorian drifter who was found guilty and sentenced to 16 years’ jail in a separate trial, is now the only person serving time for the murder, although prosecutors said he could not have killed Kercher by himself.

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The prosecutors said the lack of signs of a struggle on Kercher’s body showed that more than one assailant had pinned her down before stabbing her in the neck.

The appeals judges said it was not up to them to decide whether or not Guede acted alone.

They said no motive had been established and there was no indication that Knox or Sollecito had known Guede before the murder.

“The sudden choice of two young people, good and helpful to others, to commit evil for evil’s sake, without any further reason, seems even more incomprehensible (if it is) to support the criminal act of a young man they had no relation to,” the court said.

REUTERS/Italian State Police/HandouRudy Hermann Guede

It also said there was no proof that the knife discovered in Sollecito’s flat, which police identified as the murder weapon, had ever been present at the crime scene.

The grieving family of Kercher, a Leeds University student, said after the acquittal they felt they were “back to square one” and they needed to know who killed their beloved “Mez”, as Kercher was known, if Knox and Sollecito were innocent.

Prosecutors have said they will appeal against Knox’s acquittal at the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeal court, which can only review possible technical errors in lower court cases.

Independent forensic experts told the appeal trial that police had botched the investigation and had failed to secure the crime scene or follow international forensic protocols. DNA evidence could have been contaminated, they said.

SEATTLE, Washington — A tearful Amanda Knox arrived home in the United States Tuesday and thanked her supporters a day after she was acquitted of murder and sexual assault charges, ending a four-year ordeal in an Italian jail.

“I’m really overwhelmed right now. I was looking down from the airplane and it seemed like everything wasn’t real,” Knox said as she addressed supporters and a media scrum at Seattle airport shortly after her plane landed.

“What’s important for me to say is just thank you to everyone who’s believed in me, who’s defended me, who has supported my family,” she said in her first public comments since being freed, brushing away tears.

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“My family’s the most important thing to me right now. I just want to go be with them. So thank you for being there for me.”

Her parents, Kurt Knox and Etta Mellas, also offered their thanks, as they accompanied their daughter off the plane and back home.

Lawyer Theodore Simon said the 24-year-old had been through “a trying and grueling four-year nightmarish marathon that no child or parent should have to endure.”

Knox left Rome swiftly after the decision was handed down by an Italian court, first heading for London to board a connecting flight to Seattle.

She had been convicted along with two others and sentenced to 26 years in prison for taking part in the murder and sexual assault of her British housemate Meredith Kercher, then 21, who was found stabbed to death in the cottage they shared.

Knox’s ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who also had appealed his conviction on the same charges, was likewise acquitted Monday in the university town of Perugia in central Italy where Knox and Kercher were studying.

Kercher was found in a pool of blood on the floor of her bedroom. Her body was covered in dozens of knife wounds and bruises and investigators found traces of a sexual assault.

The only person now convicted of the crime is local drifter Rudy Guede, who is serving 16 years after his earlier appeals were rejected.

Prosecutors had claimed that Knox, Sollecito and Guede may have been in the house for a drug deal and then taken part in a frenzied sexual attack.

Knox sobbed and had to be escorted out of the courtroom after the verdict was read out on Monday as her family hugged and cried in joy.

Outside the court, an angry crowd of local residents shouted: “Shame! Shame!” and “Murderers!”

Although she was cleared of murder and sexual assault, Knox was found guilty of slander for incriminating the owner of a local bar where she worked as a waitress in her first interrogation just days after the murder.

She was sentenced to time already served and will have to pay compensation to the unjustly accused man, Patrick Lumumba, as well as his legal fees.

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said he will petition against the ruling in Italy’s highest appeals court to “ensure justice is done.”

But an appeal by the prosecution would probably have to be held in Italy in absentia as the US does not extradite its citizens abroad for trials.

And Kercher’s family were left in shock.

“This result is crazy. It makes a mockery of the original trial,” Kercher’s father John was quoted as saying by the British tabloid Daily Mirror.

“There were 47 knife wounds on Meredith and two knives used. One person couldn’t possibly have done that,” said Kercher, who did not attend the verdict.

Kercher’s mother, brother and sister, who traveled to Italy to hear the verdict, said the truth of what really happened on the night their loved one was killed on November 1, 2007, had suddenly been thrown into doubt.

“We’re back to square one. The search goes on to find out what really happened,” Kercher’s brother, Lyle, said at a press conference in Perugia.

Italian newspapers said the acquittals were inevitable given the problems with the investigation highlighted during the appeal, but there was still no convincing picture of what had happened to Kercher.

“This is not a victory for justice. It’s an acquittal that leaves a bitter taste,” La Stampa daily said in an editorial.

Knox’s defense had the upper hand for much of the appeal, particularly after independent experts cast serious doubt on some crucial DNA evidence.

PERUGIA — American student Amanda Knox flew home free on Tuesday after spending four years in an Italian jail, leaving the family of murdered British student Meredith Kercher racked with anguish that they are no closer to the truth about her killing.

Ms. Knox, cleared of the murder by an appeals court on Monday night, left Rome shortly before midday for London where she and her family were boarding a connecting flight to their home in Seattle, airport officials said.

The 24-year-old broke down sobbing and nearly collapsed with emotion on Monday night after an appeals court in Perugia ruled she and her former boyfriend, Italian computer student Raffaele Sollecito, were not guilty of killing Ms. Kercher and should be freed immediately.

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Prosecutors said on Tuesday they would appeal against the ruling and Ms. Kercher’s disappointed family said their ordeal and the search for answers about the brutal murder would go on.

“We’re still absorbing it. You think you’ve come to a decision and now it’s been overturned,” Meredith’s mother Arline told reporters at a news conference.

The prosecution will appeal to the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest appeals court, which will rule on the legal merits of how the case was conducted, probably early next year.

The verdict was an embarrassment for the prosecutor and Italian police investigators. Independent forensic experts criticized police scientific evidence in the original investigation, saying it was unreliable.

Ms. Kercher’s half-naked body, with more than 40 wounds, was found in 2007 in the apartment she shared with Ms. Knox in the Umbrian hill town of Perugia, where both were studying.

Her sister Stephanie said the family would wait for the written explanation of the acquittal verdict in the hope that all the killers would eventually be found.

“That’s the biggest disappointment — not knowing still and knowing that there is someone or people out there who have done this,” she said.

Ivorian drug dealer Rudy Guede is serving a 16-year sentence for his role in the murder. But investigators believe more than one person held Ms. Kercher down while she was stabbed and had her throat cut.

“I understand the courts agreed that he wasn’t acting alone,” said Meredith’s brother Lyle. “Of course if those released yesterday are not the guilty party, we are now obviously left wondering who is the other person or people.”

The appeal trial gripped attention on both sides of the Atlantic. There was an outpouring of sympathy and outrage from many in the United States who regarded Ms. Knox as an innocent girl caught in the clutches of a medieval justice system.

The Knox family conducted a relentless and well organized public relations campaign to convince the world of Amanda’s innocence and counteract both a lurid media image of “Foxy Knoxy,” and the prosecution’s portrayal of her as a sex-obsessed and manipulative “she-devil”.

The family were familiar figures on U.S. talk shows and in Perugia during the trial, assiduously courted by television networks eager for the first interview with a woman who can now expect lucrative offers to tell her story.

“She has earning power now that she is free,” said Candace Dempsey, Seattle-based author of “Murder in Italy”, one of around a dozen books that have already been written on the case.

“She can write a book and she can certainly help her family pay back the bills. She is a beautiful girl and she has a dramatic story to tell,” she said.

The Knox family engaged the services of Gogerty Marriott, a Seattle-based public relations firm, to run what the prosecution described as a “million dollar campaign”, backed by an Internet donor drive and fund-raising events at home.

The Knox family have been quoted as saying they have had to re-mortgage their house to support their legal and other bills but their representatives in Italy were tight-lipped over what the appeal has cost the family.

“They have made many sacrifices to support their daughter,” Maria Del Grosso, one of the legal team, said simply, declining to comment in any more detail.

Prosecutors have been bitterly critical of the campaign, which they said had pre-judged the case even before the start of the hearing.

“There has been an abnormal amount of media pressure from outside which reflects a lack of understanding of Italian judicial practice,” Perugia prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said.

The court upheld a conviction against Ms. Knox for slander after she had falsely accused barman Patrick Lumumba of the murder and Mignini said that element alone meant the appeal could throw up fresh surprises.

“The conviction for slander against Patrick Lumumba still stands. At this point, the question remains as to why Amanda slandered him, what was the motive?”

For their part, Meredith Kercher’s family have made no direct criticism of Ms. Knox or Mr. Sollecito but have made clear they feel that the real victim of the tragedy has been sidelined in the media excitement.

They said they could not begin to forgive as long as it was unclear who had killed Meredith.

“It’s still very difficult to speak in terms of forgiveness until we know the truth,” said Meredith’s sister Stephanie. “Until the truth comes out we can’t forgive anyone because no one’s admitted to the crime.”

“It may be a case of waiting years to get to the truth, we just have to wait again now.”

Ms. Kercher, a Leeds University student, was on a year-long exchange program in Perugia when she was killed. Her murder brought a flood of unwelcome attention to the medieval town in central Italy that her family said she loved.

Prosecutors had alleged Ms. Kercher resisted attempts by Ms. Knox, Mr. Sollecito and Guede to involve her in an orgy. Their case was weakened by forensic experts who dismissed police evidence that traces of DNA belonging to Ms. Knox and Ms. Kercher were found on a kitchen knife identified as the murder weapon.

The defence argued that no clear motive or evidence linking the defendants to the crime had emerged, and said Ms. Knox was falsely implicated in the murder by prosecutors determined to convict her regardless of the evidence.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/italian-prosecution-will-appeal-amanda-knox-verdict/feed6stdAmanda Knox reacts at the announce of the verdict of her appeal trial in the Meredith Kercher murder on October 3, 2011.‘I am paying with my life for things I did not commit,’ Knox tells courthttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/i-am-paying-with-my-life-for-things-i-did-not-commit-knox-tells-court
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/i-am-paying-with-my-life-for-things-i-did-not-commit-knox-tells-court#commentsMon, 03 Oct 2011 12:12:10 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=97642

By Deepa Babington

PERUGIA, Italy — American student Amanda Knox made a tearful plea on Monday to be acquitted of murdering her British roommate during a brutal erotic game, saying she was paying with her life for a crime she did not commit.

“I am the same person I was four years ago,” said Knox, visibly shaking and fighting to hold back tears. “I am not what they say I am,” she said, seeking to rebut prosecution suggestions that she was a manipulative, sex-mad “she-devil.”

“I lost a friend, in the most brutal and inexplicable way possible. My absolute faith in the police authorities was betrayed, I’ve had to face absolutely unfair … and baseless accusations. I am paying with my life for things I did not commit.”

The Seattle native and her Italian boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, are fighting a 2009 verdict that found them guilty of stabbing Leeds University exchange student Meredith Kercher to death during a drug-fuelled sexual assault.

The panel of two professional and six lay judges retired to consider a verdict immediately after Knox’s final plea. Their decision is expected after 8 p.m. local time on Monday.

HIGH HOPES

Expectations are high among many in the United States that 24-year-old Knox will walk free from the Perugia prison where she has spent nearly four years, after a forensic review cast deep doubt on DNA evidence used to convict her and 27-year-old Sollecito.

In his own final plea Sollecito said in a halting voice: “I am a Mr. Nobody but now they want Mr. Nobody to spend the rest of his life in jail.”

Francesco Maresca, a lawyer for the Kercher family, did not comment on the pleas made by Knox and Sollecito, but said the Kerchers were stunned at the media clamor for their release.

“We’re just hours away from a sentence in such an important trial and we continue to only hear pleas for acquittal almost as if the decision is a foregone conclusion,” he told reporters.

The Kerchers — mother Arline, sister Stephanie and brother Lyele — missed the hearing because their flight landed just as the judges retired. But they are expected in court for the verdict.

The appeal trial has gripped attention on both sides of the Atlantic, four years after 21-year-old Kercher’s body was found in a pool of blood in the university town.

The people of Perugia resent the media attention, believing the hitherto quaint image of their city has been sullied by allegations of drugs, drink and orgies among students there.

Knox, who has visibly lost weight in jail and who almost broke down at the start of her plea, told the court: “Four years ago I did not know what tragedy was. It was something I saw on TV. It was not part of me.

“I do not have contempt for life. I did not do the things they say I did. I did not kill, rape or steal.”

She raised her voice to say through tears: “I insist on the truth, I insist after four desperate years on our innocence … I want to go home. I want to go back to my life. I do not want to be punished. I do not want to be deprived of my life for something I did not do, because I am innocent.”

Knox barely spoke Italian when she was arrested but addressed the court fluently, having learned the language in jail.

One of Knox’s lawyers said over the weekend she was worried, but trying to keep positive ahead of the verdict.

“She is confident, she is jittery, she is waiting and a little bit frightened by the wait,” lawyer Maria Del Grosso told reporters after visiting her in prison. She said Knox attended mass in prison on Saturday.

Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was on a year-long exchange program in Perugia when she was murdered. Her body was found with more than 40 wounds and her throat had been slashed.

Knox and Sollecito were arrested days after the murder, but have steadfastly maintained their innocence throughout. A third man, Ivorian drug dealer Rudy Guede, was imprisoned for his role in the murder.

Prosecutors say Kercher was pinned down and stabbed to death when she resisted attempts by the three to involve her in an orgy. They say Knox was a cold-blooded, sex-obsessed girl who led her boyfriend astray.

They have also pointed to a fraught relationship between the two women, saying the British exchange student resented her American roommate’s promiscuity.

But the prosecution’s case was weakened by a review by forensic experts that undermined police scientific evidence saying traces of DNA belonging to Knox were found on a kitchen knife identified as the murder weapon. They also said alleged traces of Sollecito’s DNA on the Briton’s bra clasp may have been contaminated.

The defense has argued that no clear motive or evidence linking the defendants to the crime has emerged, and say Knox is innocent, falsely implicated in the murder by prosecutors determined to convict her regardless of the evidence.

The prosecution says plenty of other evidence links Knox to the crime, including her false accusation against a Congolese barman and a theft she and Sollecito are alleged to have staged in the apartment to throw police off track.

Sollecito’s lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, said her client was very emotional but strengthened by hopes of freedom. During his plea he held up a cream-colored plastic bracelet inscribed “Free Amanda and Raffaele.”

“We think that there were some big errors in the first phases of the trial but in this phase there has been more attention from the court on the key evidence,” Bongiorno said.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/i-am-paying-with-my-life-for-things-i-did-not-commit-knox-tells-court/feed8stdAmanda Knox, the U.S. student convicted of murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Italy in November 2007, arrives in court for her appeal trial session in Perugia October 3, 2011.